Carr writes, “Many people, including the dozen or so current and former employees I spoke with (who did not want to be identified criticizing their bosses, past or present), worry over Mr. Thomson’s departure because they think Mr. Baker and Mr. Fenwick are not up to their roles.

“With a background as a neoconservative columnist from Britain, Mr. Baker shares Mr. Thomson’s politics, but little of his managerial experience or his history of reinventing newsrooms. Mr. Baker was a columnist at The Times of London and its United States editor and also worked as the Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times. His antipathy for the current administration was memorialized in an appearance on Fox News during which he satirized the president as a false messiah.

“After three years as a deputy managing editor of The Journal, Mr. Baker has no initiatives to call his own and little constituency in the newsroom. On Tuesday, the day after he was appointed, he walked the halls of the newspaper and for the reporters I spoke with, seeing him out and about was a startling sight.

“When he moved to The Journal in 2009, Mr. Baker was, by dint of interest and skill set, a columnist and pundit and, as I have written here in the past, he hasn’t been shy about imposing his political and religious views on news coverage. (This tendency remains strong, according to current employees.)”

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Show me the Money," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.